The place takes its name from a schooner, the Maud, and the town-site reserve was set aside in 1896. The plans were ambitious for such a remote shore: that 450-metre jetty, capped with a T-head, plus a tramway, a well, and a woolshed, all built to ship wool, sheep, and cattle out of the Gascoyne stations to markets down the coast. For half a century it worked, after a fashion. But the trade never grew the way its backers hoped, and when shipping ceased around 1947 the jetty was dismantled — its timbers carted 85 kilometres north to Norwegian Bay by the North West Whaling Company, repurposed for a different industry entirely. Schemes for oil exploration and fish processing were floated and sank. By 1969 the old reserve was partly folded into the lease of Cardabia Station, and Mauds Landing slipped off the maps.

In 2000, the empty beach drew a far grander vision. Coral Coast Marina Developments proposed a 200-million-dollar resort and marina at Mauds Landing — hotels, canals, and berths cut into the shore directly behind one of the longest fringing coral reefs on Earth. To its promoters it was opportunity; to a growing chorus of scientists, fishers, and ordinary West Australians, it was a threat to the very thing that made Ningaloo extraordinary. The reef here sits astonishingly close to the beach, a ribbon of living coral you can reach by wading. Pour a marina behind it, the critics warned, and you risk the silt, the runoff, and the slow strangulation of a wonder that had survived untouched for millennia.

What followed became the largest environmental campaign in Western Australia's history. The novelist Tim Winton lent it his voice and donated his 25,000-dollar Premier's Award prize money to the cause. In December 2002 roughly 15,000 people marched through Fremantle — a crowd the mayor called the largest in living memory — carrying a single demand: save Ningaloo. By mid-2003 the pressure had climbed to the top, and Premier Geoff Gallop travelled to Coral Bay to deliver the verdict in person. The marina would not proceed. The government would instead pursue World Heritage protection for the coast — a status the Ningaloo Coast finally achieved in 2011. A beach almost no one had heard of had become the place where a state decided what kind of future it wanted.

Today Mauds Landing is given back, quietly, to its oldest residents. The beach curves roughly 8.5 kilometres from the point of the bay, gently north-east, ending near Oyster Bridge where a band of beachrock reef meets the sand. Between December and March, endangered green and loggerhead turtles drag themselves ashore here in the dark to lay their eggs, and the beach is treated as a sacred place by many in Coral Bay for exactly that reason. Visitors are asked to keep at least 15 metres back from nesting turtles and to switch off torches and camera flashes, which can disorient hatchlings scrambling toward the sea. Four-wheel-drivers come for the superb beach fishing. The jetty piles still stand offshore — not a ruin to mourn, but a marker of everything this coast chose not to become.